“All Is Vanity” by C. Allan Gilbert, evoking the inevitable decay of life and beauty toward death. (from here)

What inspired this post? As politely and sweetly as he could manage, a commenter called me a bigot (see here).

Am I a bigot? Yes. Everyone is a bigot. You. Your parents. Your brothers and sisters. Your friends and neighbors. Your countrymen. Everyone in the whole world. The only person who ever lived who was not a bigot was Jesus.

We all to some degree try to justify ourselves at the expense of someone else. If we can raise ourselves above another — if we can humble another — we think we must be better. At least, that’s a very popular theory.

The Bible says we are each made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). Even though we are puny, finite things, we should each be able see something divine — something we can love — in each other. But often we don’t.

Review human history. Read the newspapers. Consider the anger we sometime see simmering in each other. Remember the broken homes. Remember all the innocent children aborted, orphaned and forgotten, or just abandoned. Contemplate all the people who make you furious for no reason at all.

“I” am at the center of all “I” perceive. So it is we each tend to go through life thinking it must all be about us. Everything we do and all that is must be for our benefit. If we give something of ourselves to another then they owe us (whether they know it or not). That’s how the strong rationalize enslaving the weak. If the strong protect weak, then the weak must owe the strong something. Thus, slavery began as a protection racket.

Yet I stray. What is a bigot? How is it we are all bigots? We each try to justify ourselves. I am a good person. I deserve good things. I deserve whatever good things other people have. I covet what others have that I don’t have.

We measure ourselves against each other, and we each want to be better than other people. We damn those who seem to have more. In the age of diversity, how is that done? We join in common cause with people who look like us, sound like us, dress like us, work like us, think like us,…., and sin like us. We organize with the people in our identity group, and we demand respect, our “rights” — and money.

Consider all the identity groups. There are trade associations demanding tariffs. There are unions demanding employer sanctions. There businesses too big to fail. There are racial, sexual, ethnic, and creedal groups demanding “affirmative action. There are groups preoccupied with sexual perversions demanding our affirmation. There are bureaucrats out to save the world demanding bigger salaries and greater powers.

Where does all this bigotry — this competition to make it all about ME lead?

4 Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4 Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously”?

6 But He gives more grace. Therefore He says:

“God resists the proud,But gives grace to the humble.”

How we can test ourselves? How we determine whether we are motivated bigotry? There is a simple way that works most of the time. If we are willing to debate the rightness of our cause without personally attacking our opponent, that is a good sign. That doesn’t mean you cannot point out something your opponent is doing wrong. For example, if your opponent is willing to twist the Constitution into a pretzel, that has to be noted because it is relevant. We are not suppose to do that. Unfortunately, because we are bigots, we don’t want to hear our sins called sins.

What is the best way to avoid bigotry? What is the best way to test ourselves? Instead of trying to justify ourselves, we must believe on Jesus; we must put our faith in God. We obey His commands.

12 This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

It is not our job or our right to make our neighbors behave as we think they should behave. We have the right and the responsibility to protect each other from the brutes and bullies among us. However, so long as so-called brutes and bullies do not abuse our family, friends and neighbors; we have no right to use government power to attack those brutes and bullies. That sort of behavior that just makes us a brute, a bully, and a bigot.

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31 thoughts on “WHAT IS A BIGOT?”

Simple Definition of bigot
: a person who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people, ideas, etc. : a bigoted person; especially : a person who hates or refuses to accept the members of a particular group (such as a racial or religious group)
Source: Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary

That’s describes the actions of an obvious, stereotypical bigot. What most people don’t like is someone who doesn’t affirm them. If the mere existence of a Muslim offend you, for example, then you have a problem. If you are just trying to avoid the problem of ISIS terrorist killing people, that’s understandable. But some people call what is understandable bigotry too.

Black or white or purple are not choices. They are what people are. Most nowadays take gay as the same. Why would you not affirm someone for who they ‘are’ by nature and, if you will, nature’s god?
I don’t think it has anything to do with who’s beliefs are affirmed before our own. That’s not really the point, in my view.

We have the right to discriminate in our choices. We have the right to make poor choices. What we don’t have the right to do is deprive another of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is the sort of bigotry we must expect our government to prosecute.

In a free society, we each have to accept the consequences of our choices. In a free society, bigots cannot use the government to heap the consequences of their bad choices upon others.

This can be seen by Aristotle’s own inability to explain the gross injustice of slavery.

Slavery was so ingrained in human culture that Aristotle thought it to be a normal, natural state of affairs.

Also, modern philosophers, try as they might to replace God with a Golden Rule, or the rule of the proletariat, or the supreme power of symbols and words, only succeeded in replacing God with iron fisted, genocidal rule by the State (Plato’s “Republic”).

Indeed, without God and his teachings, man can only hope to be excellent in wickedness, making music, or making money.

I believe that Abraham Lincoln and our Founding Fathers correct understanding of Aristotle’s natural law theory AND Christianity, are responsible for civilized man’s radical change concerning the injustice of slavery.

Well said, Tom. We all have biases, we’re all bigots of one form or another. Jesus Christ did teach us another way and He turned the world of human hierarchies on it’s head. So “the first shall be last” and “blessed be the meek” and “what you do for the least of these, you do for me.” It’s quite radical. He reveals Himself first not just to a woman, but to a Samaritan woman. The disciples that He chooses are not the upper class and the educated, but rather fishermen and those a bit rough around the edges.

I like to read about the early church, especially Paul’s struggles. He is really in the thick of things, Greeks, Jews, Pagans, all sorts of dietary laws and then those who are worshiping idols, circumcision, battles with Barnabas. Ha! And we think we have problems today. 🙂

Sadly, I kind of figured that you might misconstrue my comment this way. It was not a “personal attack” on you. It was a comment and an intellectual criticism on what the “whole” Republican Party is doing to itself. You don’t address the intellectual merits of the underlying problem, but rather go into a diatribe about how you have been personally attacked as a bigot and how you are and are not one. Honestly, and with all love and respect brother, who cares about debating either of our bruised feelings? Although we may have strongly held conflicting ideas, I think neither of us means to be personally uncivil. It’s not my intent anyway.

As you have often said, this is not about you or me, it is about ideas. For the most part, your article above is non-responsive to the ideas that I wrote about in my comment. For example, explain how the Republican Party has not turned nativist and isolationist under Donald Trump? The list of conservatives in your own party (including your Ted Cruz) that have taken varying principled stands against the hate mongering that Mr. Trump represents should at least be taken into account in your explanation, but instead of addressing directly this amazingly dark influence that has balkanized the GOP, you try to dramatize this into something personal about you. Again, it’s not about you or me – it’s about the ideas that effect all of us. And it is also not about how we poor white men would like to blanket ourselves in the comforting emotions of our feeling victimized by some litany of historically repressed minorities – it’s about how this Trump-incited rage and fear is walling the Party of Lincoln evermore self indulgently inward on itself.

As for bigotry, I agree that we are all bigots, just as we are all sinners. However, as you know, it is only after we recognize our sins as sins that we can repent them and remedy our situation by trying to “go forth and sin no more”, or at least by attempting not to commit that same sin again. A sinner who does not accept his sin as sin can never repent. Bigotry works the same way. The Republican convention was a bogeyman fearfest “identifying” new threats in every direction and dividing themselves off from everyone and everything as “the other”, but could not even imagine that in so doing their own ignorance about their own bigotries are what engenders the much demonized so-called “identity politics”. Until we know we are bigots, we will remain bigots.

For example, if while I were traversing a dark alley I were confronted by an imposing black man wearing a certain culturally popular style of clothing, my immediate emotional reaction would likely be totally different than if I were being approached by an identically acting white man in a business suit, or even if it were a white man dressed in exactly the same outfit. My bigotry would not be without the context of some perhaps statistically explainable personal imprinting of racial stereotyping, but it would still be bigotry nonetheless. It is bigotry because it prejudices and colors my reaction to that individual based solely upon the pigment of his skin, not on who he actually is as an individual. Until I recognize my bigotry as bigotry how can I understand it and change? Until we as a society at least recognize the centuries-long piling on of historical and social injustices against a certain skin color that have built brick-upon-brick our towering wall of fear of black men, how do we even begin to attempt to actually remedy these rotting ruins on the American soul? And this is just one form of bigotry we all share to some extent, one area of our national sinfulness that needs to be seen in all its ugliness before we can become a more perfect pluralistic union.

I heard one of the cofounders of “Black Lives Matter” interviewed the other day. She said if they had it all to do over again, they would have named the movement “Black Lives Also Matter” because that is what it has always been about – no one ever has said that “all lives” don’t matter – that’s so obvious that only someone willfully insensitive to the issue would even mention it. There has just been this bigoted impression by all of us that somehow black lives have a long discussing history that continues to this day of just not mattering as much as white lives.

In a perfect world, there would be no sin and there would be no bigotry, but we don’t live in that world. In a perfect world, there would be no need to explain to us the visceral fear that a young black man feels just walking down the street in his own neighborhood when a police cruiser stops next to him. But we don’t live in that world, and therefore we need that explained to us by the only people who can – black and brown people who have been forced by “our” bigotry to “identify” as what “our” bigotry “identifies” them as – black and brown people – people to be unjustly feared, walled out, imprisoned and carelessly killed. People who must now stand together and ask us to stand with them in order to recognize and remedy our own fear, our own bigotries – in order to ask for simple equality and justice “also” for black and brown lives.

We live in a world where we are all sinners and bigots, and we will stay unrepentant sinners and bigots as long as we remain blind to our own bigotries, our own sins. Now that we got the fact that we are “all” bigots out of the way, tell me how Donald Trump is not just playing upon our worst bigotries and dooming the Republican Party as a trade protectionist, isolationist, nativist bastion of fear and scapegoating. That was the point of the comment – not to insult you personally with a label that we all share the burden of carrying, if we only are willing to admit it to ourselves.

We can chase our tails. When I defend the faults of my side, you come running. If I insist upon pointing out the faults of your side, you leave in a huff. I can defend my side. Can you defend your side?

I don’t claim perfection. I also don’t claim the right to run your life and make a perfect “Conservative” out of you. I try to vote for statesmen who will respect everyone’s right to be left in peace to run their own lives. Do you?

Look at the Democrats. Their answer to every problem is more government, more power. What they do is create problems. How do they solve the problem of racism? Do they treat everyone the same? You know they don’t.

I cannot fix you. I have enough problems fixing me. I would just appreciate it if you would stop voting for people who promise they will not leave either of us in peace.

There are already enough people who want to rob, kill, and enslave us. We don’t need to use
“tolerance” as an excuse to vote for more.

Tom – you are creating a false equivalency. Both sides think in different ways they can use governmental power. One side (sometimes naively) thinks that the power of government can be magically used to solve, not just the facial, but the underlying historical systemic problems that lead to bigotry. The other side wants to use the coercive power of government to actively promote bigotry – “build a wall”, “ban Muslim immigration”, “give legal resident and American Muslims citizens a religious test and deport them if they don’t answer correctly”, “pass laws that promote active discrimination based upon sexual preference”, “use government to cynically make sure that it is as difficult as possible for anyone to vote who might, by demographics, be a likely Democrat”, “use torture on possible terrorism suspects”, just to name a few of the GOP calls for the use of coercive governmental powers.

Your version of my defending Democrats is to be your straw man for extreme collectivization while you get to be the hero who crusades for reasonable individualism. At their extremes, the application of arguments are beastly and unworkable, but you enjoy only pointing out the unworkability of one extreme, while ignoring the downfalls of the other extreme, and while ignoring the simple fact that modern states all over the world have achieved varying historically unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity by maintaining an ever shifting imperfect balance between both ideals in their governmental systemics.

As I said before, quoting Macintyre, extreme collectivism verses extreme individualism is a falacious and irresolvable argument that both sides sadly have agreed is the “only” argument. It’s not. And anyway, as David Brooks has noted recently, the argument has essentially changed between the two parties. Now the new debate (which actually has historically been a reoccurring old debate) is “open versed closed”, and it is an argument that is happening globally. One venerable American party wants to dissolve the Pax Americana that it has actually been the greater promoter of since WW II. It wants America to turn inward on itself in suspicion, hate and fear. What is your response to that debate?

You claim that you fear the tyranny of government and the power hungry tyrants that would use governmental power to enslave us. I agree with that healthy sentiment. But honestly, you don’t see any of the elements of the power hungry demogue who would be tyrant in Donald Trump, and yet you do see all the signs of the dictator tyrant in a grandmother stateswoman? Do you really see a greater model of simple virtue in the proudly womanizing and overtly greedily grandiose Donald Trump, but also you see all the seven deadly sins coming from a woman who has remained married to her husband through thick and thin and has lived a life of mostly public service? This is not even a false equivalency on the scale of virtues – one side is bent to the point of being broken. Both candidates are sinners, as are we all, but just looking at the overt features of their lives, it’s not that Trump’s sins may or may not be greater, or whether we should judge the sins of either of them, it’s that Donald Trump, God love him, is unabashedly proud and unrepentant of his sins. He does not even see them as sins. He sees them as virtues. Trump openly disdains virtues and the virtuous as suckers and losers. He mocks simple civility and common decency. He promotes “the big lie” and thrives on the drama of scandal, and the least fact based the scandal, the easier it is to promote through the false rumor, the insinuation and the innuendo. He brandishes childish ad homonyms as his favorite bullying tactic for fellow Republicans and Democrats alike, anyone who gets in his way. Ask your Ted Cruz how this works?

Does none of this give you any pause at all in promoting here this man and where he would take our country?

The other side wants to use the coercive power of government to actively promote bigotry – “build a wall”, “ban Muslim immigration”, “give legal resident and American Muslims citizens a religious test and deport them if they don’t answer correctly”, “pass laws that promote active discrimination based upon sexual preference”, “use government to cynically make sure that it is as difficult as possible for anyone to vote who might, by demographics, be a likely Democrat”, “use torture on possible terrorism suspects”, just to name a few of the GOP calls for the use of coercive governmental powers.

Let’s look at your list more closely. You say that these ideas “actively promote bigotry”:
• “build a wall” — You omitted :at the country’s border.” Well, we already do, in theory, have a barrier there, including border patrols and various kinds of border observation techniques. A wall, it seems to me, would be far more humane than spotting and shooting people after they sneak across the current poorly defended border.

Far more border-crashers are killed by border patrol and by their own “helpers” (jackals, they’re called) than unarmed blacks are killed by police. The wall would save lives — mostly Mexican lives, with a share of Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi and others who come across our porous southern border.

And about 40% of Mexicans support increased border enforcement. Are they bigots, too? How is Trump’s actual statement bigoted?

• “ban Muslim immigration” — You omitted (“… temporarily, until we can figure out how to properly vet them.” Are you seriously in favor of admitting a large group of people, unvetted, that we know contains ISIS operatives? How is the actual statement by Trump bigoted?

Admittedly, my effort here was a rhetorical shotgun list to exemplify a totally new GOP emphasis toward fear and bigotry driven isolationism and exclusion. I hoped to establish the point generally and obviously without debating each particular. Throw any given item out if you must, but the overwhelming evidence of the closing of America still remains.

Arguing the particulars in each complex case can only come from a position of mutual relative ignorance, unless you are an expert on immigration issues and security procedures, in which case I bow to that expertise. And although I can tell you, without disclosing the particulars, that I have some time ago taken a personal frontline part in protecting our sea borders and in policing the high seas from drug and weapons trafficking and from terrorism, I am no expert on the immigration issue, but, like any average citizen who reads about the issues, I do recognize when something is obvious.

The prospect of a giant Berlin style wall seems obviously over costly and grandiosely unworkable, given the terrain and distance, beyond any level of security benefit that building such a wall would hope to accomplish. Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I do also remember reading somewhere that most illegal immigrants remaining in this country actually overstayed legal visas. How would a wall help that?

Excessively militarizing ourselves with a giant wall on our southern border also seems obviously and excessively aimed at mostly brown, mostly Catholic, mostly ethnically Hispanic people – no one is wanting to build a giant wall along the 48th parallel even though that seems to be the entry point of some of the 9/11 terrorists. No one wants to wall off our sea borders, which would have to come next as desperate south-of-the-border refugees from poverty and violence sought new avenues of entry. And can just look to Europe and to the Med to see just what a humanitarian nightmare that boat refugee scenario presents.

Real solutions to such seemingly intractable problems take expertise and seem to be dismally incremental and necessarily imperfect, else any number of both Democratic and Republican administrations would have brilliantly solved this problem already. But we think that Donald Trump can magically do it, notwithstanding any reasonable criticism, simply because he says he can and it will be a “beautiful wall”. But seriously, don’t you think that there are more cost-beneficial ways to resolve as much as we can of this problem humanely and without all the rhetorically bigoted racial and ethnic overtones that ignorantly and repeatedly shouting “build a wall” and “deport them all” implies?

As for banning Muslims based solely upon their religion, or deporting people based upon religious tests, I do have some expertise on the Constitution, and I can tell you that this is not even close to being constitutional (a document that I swore several oaths to support), and it also violates the most sacred pluralistic values that our nation holds dear. To say that the religious ban will be temporary does not change the fact that it is even for a moment unsustainably unconstitutional and religiously bigoted.

You no doubt have heard where Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” If we are to remain free, with a level of free trade and the freedom to travel, if we are to maintain a values of pluralism and freedom of conscience, at some point we will always have to sacrifice some measure of perfect security. If we are to remain America, we will always have to be open to blending in different cultures, religions and ethnicities as we have done for centuries while fiercely guarding our age-old values. We therefore can’t let the Donald Trumps out there ultimately own our freedoms by giving into our primal fears and our hatred.

Admittedly, my effort here was a rhetorical shotgun list to exemplify a totally new GOP emphasis toward fear and bigotry driven isolationism and exclusion. I hoped to establish the point generally and obviously without debating each particular.

Think about that last sentence. Do you intend to debate, or are you just going to fire accusations as fast as you can?

The first duty of any government is to protect its people, to establish law and order so that the people can feed, cloth, and shelter themselves in security. Redistributing the wealth in not in even in our Constitution.

Consider yourself. You can easily and enthusiastically attack your own countrymen as the most horrible bigots. Why? It appears to be just because they do not belong to a particular political party (i.e., they don’t belong to the party of your choice). Meanwhile, the presidential nominee of your party is so crooked she obviously belongs in jail, and you don’t have anything to say about that. What could you say? She is not guilty? How long would it be before that position became untenable?

And what will you do if I point out that Islam is religion/political ideology whose adherents have a long history of attacking the West? In the past you have just self-righteously ignored the fact that what people believe makes a difference. We cannot understand the Koran. Sharia law is somehow not a problem. Perhaps you think Muslims will just give up their religion like they have in Europe. Only no such thing has happened, and the Europeans are BREXITING.

I detest what the Democratic Party is doing to people like you. That is why I will vote for a Conservative Muslim before I will vote for a Democrat. In fact, I have supported a Muslim when given that choice. I understand that what individual people believe makes a difference. So if a Muslim is willing to tolerate my beliefs, I will tolerate his.

That said, I think it is positively absurd to advocate wide-open borders. We have to know who is coming into our country, and we cannot let everyone who wants to come come and still expect our spendthrift welfare state to function without collapsing. Do you want to get rid of that welfare state? Are your leaders willing to give up all those potential Democrat voters? What about you?

For example, when the news keeps reporting blacks murdering blacks, as in Chicago, you will be wary or prudent in the presences of blacks. Ninety percent of black murders are caused by blacks on blacks and eighty-two percent of whites murder whites, However, a prudent person white or black, knows better than to associate with someone who has a reputation as a trouble maker.

Bigotry is fear of associations. But is there ever a warranted reason not to fear someone who you fear will cause you harm?

Whether it is Muslims wearing garb on a plane cause you to worry, you are a bigot. However, Muslims in the USA only comprise one percent of our population. Eastern Indians wear similar garb, and many will mistakenly fear being on a plane with them.

My point is if we want to end bigotry of blacks, it will not end until a white person no longer fears walking in a black neighborhood, and visa versa. That will never end until we all start obeying the commandments of God.

I think that you get at the heart of it scatterwisdom. It’s not easy to get past our fears and treat people with love for who they are rather than how they look or dress, or what religion that they practice. It’s complex and often based upon real environmental contexts that actually themselves stem from the dammage done by bigotries and mistreatments that go back centuries. It’s a difficult situation, but we won’t begin to solve it until we recognize it in ourselves, and we love as God told us to love.

“Think about that last sentence. Do you intend to debate, or are you just going to fire accusations as fast as you can?”

I guess if we are going to, as you say, debate debating, then if you are to be fair you should also quote my next two sentences, and you might also mentioned the fact that I responded honestly to both of Keith’s so-called “challenges to (my) thoughtless assertions”.

“The first duty of any government is to protect its people, to establish law and order so that the people can feed, cloth, and shelter themselves in security. Redistributing the wealth in not in even in our Constitution.”

Huh?

“Consider yourself. You can easily and enthusiastically attack your own countrymen as the most horrible bigots. Why? It appears to be just because they do not belong to a particular political party (i.e., they don’t belong to the party of your choice).”

I thought we were over this. We are ALL bigots. It’s facing our bigotries that I was talking about. Pointing out that Trump’s appeal is to our worst bigotries is only dishonest if it is not true and I knew it were not true. I pointed to several Trumpisms that are blatantly bigoted. They are I fact the definition of bigotry. I can find you many more if you like. Tell me how what’s obvious is not true?

And it’s not a matter of blind party loyalty – many Republicans are grimacing at the nakedly bigoted things that come out of Trump’s mouth. In his heart Trump may not be a bigot – how am I to know and who am I to judge? However, at some point, when he says and does enough of these things, does it really matter?

“Meanwhile, the presidential nominee of your party is so crooked she obviously belongs in jail, and you don’t have anything to say about that. What could you say? She is not guilty? How long would it be before that position became untenable?”

Now who is firing out unsubstantiated accusations and thoughtless assertions? Just because a mob screams a slander that was incited by slanderous accusers doesn’t mean that it is not slander. Do I have to find all the (mostly Republican) commissions’ reports for you that clears Clinton of any legal culpability? There have been so many scurrilous Republican witch hunts it’s hard to keep up. My admiration for the woman actually grew when she spent, what was it, 8 or 10 hours, in one such Inquisition, and she just made them look like petty political hacks. Given that Republicans have kept her under politically motivated investigations for decades trying to find anything they could, don’t you think that if they could have caught her actually doing something illegal, they would have? Anyway, isn’t it your responsibility to find some proof before you throw out accusations? Doesn’t the Bible have something to say about making false witness? What happened to basic civility? I’m not making wild accusations that Trump is a criminal and should be in prison. I don’t even know if In his heart he is as bad as what he says, but it is what he has actually said and done that I am pointing out. And it is what he has said and done that makes me think that we ought not to make him president.

“And what will you do if I point out that Islam is religion/political ideology whose adherents have a long history of attacking the West? In the past you have just self-righteously ignored the fact that what people believe makes a difference. We cannot understand the Koran. Sharia law is somehow not a problem. Perhaps you think Muslims will just give up their religion like they have in Europe. Only no such thing has happened, and the Europeans are BREXITING.”

So you think that we should violate the first amendment by having the government infringe upon Muslims’ right to practice their religion?

“That is why I will vote for a Conservative Muslim before I will vote for a Democrat. In fact, I have supported a Muslim when given that choice. I understand that what individual people believe makes a difference. So if a Muslim is willing to tolerate my beliefs, I will tolerate his.”

So you don’t favor a religious test, only a party affiliation test? Maybe I’m dim, but I’m sorry, I find all this a bit incoherent. Honestly, what are you trying to say brother?

“That said, I think it is positively absurd to advocate wide-open borders. We have to know who is coming into our country, and we cannot let everyone who wants to come come and still expect our spendthrift welfare state to function without collapsing.”

Who argued for “open borders”? Unlike Donald Trump, who avoided service with “a foot spur” (on which foot, he now can’t remember), I’ve actually flown missions to protect our borders.

All I said was that building a giant “beautiful” wall across the entire southern borders of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California is obviously dumb from cost-benefit analysis, is obviously unworkable from a practical standpoint, obviously won’t solve the real problems, and obviously can only be motivated by a particular animus toward the given race, religion and ethnicity that generally comes from that direction.

They have a fairly well guarded wall between the cities of San Diego and Tijuana. People still breach it constantly from above and below. I have at one time or another flown over much of the southwestern US – it’s rugged beyond most people’s understanding. How many new thousands of government employees do you think it will take to patrol the thousands of miles of harsh open deserts, rivers, mountain ranges and fields? You think NASA space exploration is a waste of money, but you don’t see this moonshot to wall us in from the scary brown folks as an asinine boondoggle?

You don’t want to give the government the resources to build infrastructure, roads and schools, but you want to throw the billions and billions of dollars to the government to fund and continuously man this monstrosity of a white elephant?

“Do you want to get rid of that welfare state? Are your leaders willing to give up all those potential Democrat voters? What about you?”

Huh? You’re trying to change the subject, but I can certainly sympathize with why.

“I detest what the Democratic Party is doing to people like you.”

That’s kind of dramatic, don’t you think? Give people a little more credit Tom. You are a highly intelligent, well educated, well meaning, religious person who I admire and love deeply. We just happen disagree on some things. I’m no drone of the Democratic Party, and I don’t believe that you’re a minion for Donald Trump either. You are the one who is a self proclaimed ideologue, not me.

And, as I wrote In my response to Keith, I’m no expert on the complexities of border security or wall engineering or the intricacies of immigration. I’m just pointing out the obvious things that any voter should question before giving billions, or perhaps trillions of dollars to a reality TV star who bankrupted several casinos in Atlantic City just because we should take his word for it that it will be “wonderful” without any further explanation. Do you? Seriously? Then if you’ve got the data and the expertise to prove this enormous government expenditure of taxpayer dollars is a viable, cost effective, engineering possibly, that isn’t based on unreasonable fears and prejudices, then I’ll listen, and I won’t get emotional or mad to be proved wrong. I don’t have a rigid ideology to protect at all costs here.

It’s just a friendly conversation about politics, policy, candidates and issues. But I’ll stop if it’s frustrating you to have these ideas challenged. I guess we both have better things to do.

Tony, as one who has sworn to protect and uphold the Constitution many times over, doesn’t it bother you in the slightest that what your heroine, Ms. Clinton, ( Who has also sworn to protect and uphold the Constitution.), did with her private email server to dodge potential FOIA requests, and put national secrets at risk of hacking, got away with a crime that would land a lesser person, say you or me, in jail for a long time, or at the very least, ruined our careers and livelihood for the rest of our lives?

As far as the topic of this post, bigotry is a rather strong word that I’d reserve for people like members of White Supremacy groups, La Raza and the New Black Panthers, etal. Yes Black and Brown and Yellow people can be just as bigoted as White folks.

What most of us are is discriminatory. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, although it can be. You discriminate when you choose bacon over sausage or tea over coffee. You discriminate when you choose to be friendly with the well dressed Black person, but shun the Black youth who wears his pants around his knees and listens to loud rap music.

As far as who would be a better leader for our country, the choice is clear to me. Ms. Clinton will continue Obama’s legacy of divisive politics pitting each against the other. She will make our borders more porous than they already are. Sure America has been a great melting pot, but historically, immigrants who came assimilated into the American way. That is not happening today. New immigrants want to make America over into the hellholes they just left.

Mr. Trump is not the perfect candidate, no one person is, but with his many faults, he would still be a hell of a lot better than Ms. Clinton.

Don’t disagree. You are using the word “bigot” the way most people would use it.

However, in practical terms Democrats think we are all bigots, and to some degree they are right. Their problem is that Democrats use bigotry to seize power. Whereas our reaction to bigotry should be the obvious. If we are all bigots we should minimize and divide the power we give to our leaders, just as our Constitution intended.

thatmrgguy – no offense, but you’ll have to find the part in the Constitution about emails before I start defending them. I’ve read it several times and have never seen that part in there.

As for procedures for cabinet level email security, I am no expert on that. You may want to refer to the State Department procedures at the time, the way that personal emails were treated by the previous Secretaries of State, and the results of the FBI investigation released by FBI Director James Comey, a lifelong Republican who has an honorable reputation with members on both sides of the aisle.

As for your words on bigotry and discrimination, we are going to just have to disagree. When we are talking about an unjust inequal treatment of someone that is based upon their ethnicity, race or religion, I don’t think that it is quite the same as choosing sausage over bacon. Simply because something is discrimination or bigotry does not mean that it is illegal or unconstitutional discrimination. We all may have the “right” to discriminate without it always being illegal, but that is not quite the same thing as saying that it is “right” to discriminate. Other than that, all I can do is refer you to my previous comments.

I also disagree with you about Clinton verses Trump, and I have given my reasons previously, but ultimately it ends up being each voter’s choice in the end. And it sounds like you’ve made up your mind based on your own motivations that I doubt will I could sway you from changing at this point. Good luck.

Finally on immigrants, my ancestors were probably trying to escape the “hell hole” of the potato famine and English oppression. I’m not sure we Irish will ever easily “assimilate” as much as we just take over large swaths of the place. We would have taken over more but you know what they say: “God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from conquering the world.”

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” Ronald Reagan.